Cover not available
Article published In:
Anglo-German Discourse Crossings and Contrasts
Edited by Sylvia Jaworska and Torsten Leuschner
[Pragmatics and Society 9:1] 2018
► pp. 8–25

Lexical chains and topic continuity in the register of popular scientific writing

German-English contrasts

| Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen University
| Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen University
This article presents a corpus study of lexical chains in the register of popular scientific writing, based on the English and German original texts included in the CroCo Corpus. This register is characterized by patterns resulting from the combination of accessible knowledge and scientific validity. The study aims at investigating cross-linguistic differences in terms of frequency and length of lexical chains. Chain elements are extracted by identifying the most frequent noun per text (and any lexical items associated with it by synonymy, hyponymy, or meronymy). The sentence IDs in the corpus markup are used to automatically calculate distances between occurrences of the target items. The analysis of immediacy chains and discontinuities in chains supports the investigation of contrasts in terms of topic continuity patterns.
Keywords: contrastive register analysis, cohesion, lexical chains, popular scientific writing, topic continuity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1The register of popular scientific writing
    • 2.2Cohesion and lexical chains
  • 3.Research questions and methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Frequency of lexical chains
    • 4.2Length of lexical chains
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16025.hut
References
Barzilay, Regina, and Michael Elhadad
1997 “Using Lexical Chains for Text Summarization.” Proceedings of the Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization Workshop (ISTS’97), ACL, Madrid.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker, and Steve Walker
2015 “Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4.” Journal of Statistical Software 67(1): 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baumann, Klaus-Dieter
1998 “Fachsprachliche Phänomene in den verschiedenen Sorten von populärwissenschaftlichen Vermittlungstexten.” In Fachsprachen. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Fachsprachenforschung und Terminologiewissenschaft, ed. by Lothar Hoffmann, Hartwig Kalverkämper, and Herbert Ernst Wiegand, 728–735. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Baumgarten, Nicole
2008 “Writer construction in English and German Popularized Academic Discourse: The Uses of we and wir .” Multilingua 271: 409–438. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark
2004 BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Available online at [URL].
2008 The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at [URL].
Diwersy, Sascha, Stefan Evert, and Stella Neumann
2014 “A Weakly Supervised Multivariate Approach to the Study of Language Variation.” In Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis. Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech, ed. by Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Bernhard Wälchli, 174–204. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flowerdew, John, and Richard W. Forest
2015 Signalling Nouns in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gläser, Rosemarie
1990 Fachtextsorten im Englischen. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan
1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1989 Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner
2007 “Cohesive Explicitness and Explicitation in an English-German Translation Corpus.” Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics 7 (2): 241–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Sandra Hansen, Sascha Wolfer, and Lars Konieczny
2009 “Fachkommunikation, Popularisierung, Übersetzung: Empirische Vergleiche am Beispiel der Nominalphrase im Englischen und Deutschen.” Linguistik Online 391: 109–118.Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner
2012 Cross-linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations: Insights from the Language Pair English-German. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hasan, Ruqaiya
1984 “Coherence and Cohesive Harmony.” In Understanding Reading Comprehension: Cognition, Language and the Structure of Prose, ed. by James Flood, 181–219. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.Google Scholar
Hilgartner, Stephen
1990 “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses.” Social Studies of Science 201: 519–539. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoey, Michael
1991 Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2005 Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyland, Ken
2009 Academic Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Per Bruun Brockhoff, and Rune Haubo Bojesen Christensen
2016 lmerTest: Tests in Linear Mixed Effects Models. R package version 2.0-33. [URL]
Martin, James R.
1992 English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morris, Jane, and Graeme Hirst
1991 “Lexical Cohesion, the Thesaurus, and the Structure of Text.” Computational Linguistics 171: 21–48.Google Scholar
Myers, Greg
2003 “Discourse Studies of Scientific Popularization: Questioning the Boundaries.” Discourse Studies 5 (2): 265–279. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neumann, Stella
2013 Contrastive Register Variation: A Quantitative Approach to the Comparison of English and German. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “Cross-linguistic register studies: Theoretical and methodological considerations.” Languages in Contrast 14 (1): 35–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Niederhauser, Jürg
1997 “Das Schreiben populärwissenschaftlicher Texte als Transfer wissenschaftlicher Texte.” In Schreiben in den Wissenschaften, ed. by Eva-Maria Jakobs and Dagmar Knorr, 107–122. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar
1999 Wissenschaftssprache und populärwissenschaftliche Vermittlung. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
R Core Team 2017
R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL [URL].
Salzmann, Christian
2007 Populäre Wissenschaft? Analyse der Wissenschaftskommunikation in populärwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University.Google Scholar
Serra-Borneto, Carlo
1986 “Einsteins Relativitätstheorie. Strategien der Popularisierung von Comic bis zum Sachbuch.” In Wissenschaftssprache und Gesellschaft: Aspekte des Wissenstransfers in der heutigen Zeit, ed. by Theo Bungarten, 350–366. Hamburg: Edition Akademion.Google Scholar
Silber, H. Gregory, and Kathleen F. McCoy
2002 “Efficiently Computed Lexical Chains as an intermediate Representation for Automatic Text Summarization.” Computational Linguistics 28 (4): 487–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steiner, Erich
2012 “Generating Hypotheses and Operationalizations: The example of explicitness/explicitation.” In Cross Linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations: Insights from the Language Pair English-German, ed. by Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner, 55–70. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa
2006 Collaborating towards Discourse: Lexical Cohesion in English Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teich, Elke, and Peter Fankhauser
2005 “Exploring Lexical Patterns in Text: Lexical Cohesion. Analysis with WordNet.” Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 21: 129–145.Google Scholar
Varantola, Krista
1987 “Popularization Strategies and Text-Functional Shifts in Scientific/Technical Writing.” Unesco ALSED-LSP NEWSLETTER 2 (25): 33–52.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Fetzer, Anita & Augustin Speyer
2019. Discourse relations across genres and contexts. Languages in Contrast 19:2 ► pp. 205 ff. DOI logo
Wu, Haiyan, Ying Liu & Qingfeng Wu
2020. 2020 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP), ► pp. 66 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.